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Gapare stars in Joeys victory

10 October 2008 | 08:45 - FFA

Danai Gapare scored a hat-trick as Australia finished the group stages of the AFC U16 Championship in emphatic style with a 6-0 win over Turkmenistan.

 

With Australia set to finish top of the group no matter what the result, coach Martyn Crook decided to give everybody in the squad a run to conserve the regular starting players for their upcoming quarter-final. What resulted was a terrific performance by the team of 'seconds' and gives Crook as few interesting days ahead to decide his line-up for the quarter-final.

A win in the quarter-final, against a yet to be named team because of investigations into over-age players being used, will result in automatic qualification for the 2009 FIFA U17 World Cup. If the said investigations come to nothing, Australia will face Japan in the quarter-final, while if the investigations are proven correct, the opponents will be UAE.

"It was a good game for us as the new players produced a good performance and we are definitely happy with the result at the end of the day," said Crook.

"We wanted to give some rest to the key players after securing our place at the top of the group. The new boys did well although they were playing for the first time together.

"We are pleased with the performance and the most important thing is that this performance will help us in our next game as we have a few injuries while we used players in different positions and we solved some problems."

Australia started well and went ahead after seven minutes when a corner was flicked onto Ben Kantarovski, who tapped in from close range.

Always in command, the Joeys doubled their lead in the 31st minute when Yabio was on hand for a diving header after Gapare had crossed back following a sweeping move.

Just before the break, Gapare scored his first when he had an easy finish after great work by Nathan Farrell down the right.

Three minutes after the break, Gapare had a second, and on the hour his power and speed saw him complete his hat-trick with a terrific finish.

A minute later, a cross-come-shot from Marc Warren caught the 'keeper out and managed to sneak in at the near post.

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